In the Library
The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
Mark Twain, 1865
- Form
- Form Short Story
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 10 minutes
- Chapters
- Chapters 1
- Length
- Length 3k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
"Well, I don't see no p'ints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog."
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Roughing It
Mark Twain
_Roughing It_ does the same thing across the whole silver-rush West, but Twain is the greenhorn now and the tall tales are told on him.
£1.99
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain
Twain does the same thing with a vernacular voice, but hands it to a runaway boy on a raft and lets it carry a whole country.
£1.99
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Mark Twain
_Tom Sawyer_ does the same thing with a hustle and a bet, but the con artist is a boy and the mark is a fence.
£1.99
About the book
"I don't see no p'ints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog." So says a stranger in a California mining camp, looking at Dan'l Webster, the frog Jim Smiley spent three months teaching to jump, and Smiley has forty dollars that says otherwise. But the real marvel is the man telling it. Sent to ask after a Reverend Leonidas W. Smiley, the narrator gets cornered by the stove of a tumbledown tavern by Simon Wheeler, who answers with a tale about another Smiley entirely and delivers it without the ghost of a smile, as earnest as a sermon. Smiley would bet on anything: a wheezing mare who somehow always finished a neck ahead, a bull-pup named Andrew Jackson, a frog who could snatch a fly out of the air on command. Twain lets that drawl run long and loose, and its unhurried music is the whole delight. This is the story that made his name, and you can hear why: a deadpan American voice arriving on the page fully formed. Keep one eye on the stranger.